This is what the United States gets from Egypt in return for $2 billion a year in foreign aid, as one of the world’s leaders of Islam supports a genocidal terrorist gang: Egypt’s mufti defends Hizbollah operations.

CAIRO (Reuters) - The Mufti of Egypt, the country’s senior exponent of Islamic law, said the Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah was defending Lebanon against Israeli injustice.

“The attacks, killing and destruction that are taking place in Lebanon now by Israeli forces are injustice itself,” Mufti Ali Gomaa told a meeting in southern Egypt. He was quoted by the state news agency MENA on Friday.

“This gives the Lebanese the right to defend themselves. Hizbollah is defending its country and what it is doing is not terrorism,” said Gomaa, a government appointee.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said Lebanese and Palestinian guerrilla groups should weigh the gains and losses of their operations, but Egypt has not condemned the cross-border raid in which Hizbollah seized two Israeli soldiers on July 12. Israel has responded by bombing targets in Lebanon.

On Thursday Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, one of the largest Islamist political movements in the Arab world, rejected fatwas or religious rulings by Saudi clerics against Sunnis supporting Hizbollah, which is Shi’ite Muslim.

In Qatar, prominent Muslim scholar Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi condemned the fatwas as “fanaticism.”

“When the enemy enters a country all the people there should unite to resist, be they Sunnis or Shi’ites, Muslims or Christians ... Such divisions hurt the resistance, which requires everyone to close ranks and speak in one voice,” Qaradawi said. “One is not allowed to instigate religious fanaticism which divides the people,” he told Al Jazeera television.

But wait! The geniuses of the lefty blogosphere keep telling us that Sunnis and Shi’ites would never collaborate—that’s their main argument against Saddam Hussein working with Al Qaeda! How can this be?